India and Brazil scold rich nations at Doha climate talks

The logo of the 18th United Nations Convention on Climate
Change can be seen next to the Ministry of Environment in
Doha. REUTERS/Fadi Al-Assaad

India and Brazil accused rich nations of doing too little
to fight climate change at UN talks in Doha and denied that
emerging economies were back-sliding from pledges to step up
action from 2020.

The United States and the European Union, the top rich
emitters, have both said they will not increase planned cuts
in emissions by 2020 as part of wider efforts to shift from
fossil fuels towards renewable energies.

In turn, rich nations want more action by the fast-growing
emerging nations - India is the number three greenhouse gas
emitter behind China and the United States, while Brazil
ranks about 17th.

World emissions of carbon dioxide rose about 3 percent last
year, largely because of strong growth in emerging economies
despite slowdown in many rich nations.

As each faction presses its case, the talks are floundering
in their efforts to step up ways to slow a rise in rise
temperatures that the UN panel of climate scientists says
will bring more floods, heatwaves, droughts and rising sea
levels.

"We are disappointed ... that the developed countries are in
the process of locking in low ambitions" for slowing climate
change, Mira Mehrishi, head of India's delegation in Doha,
told a news conference at the Nov. 26-Dec. 7 talks among 200
nations.

"Many developed countries are not ... concentrating on their
main problem, which in general is energy," Brazil's
delegation leader Andre Correa do Lago told Reuters.

Mehrishi denied that the group of major emerging economies -
China, India, Brazil and South Africa - were backsliding from
promises a year ago to work for a new global deal meant to be
agreed in 2015 and enter into force from 2020.

Even so, in the past year, they have emphasised that the
planned accord preserves a divide between developed and
developing nations defined in a 1992 climate treaty that
obliges rich nations to lead.

"It's not that (major emerging) countries are sliding
backwards," she said. "It is a package that will be
applicable to all."

However, the 1992 divide defines nations such as South Korea,
Singapore or Mexico as developing even though they are richer
than some European states that are bound to make cuts.

Correa do Lago noted that Brazil was reining in its main
problem as deforestation of the Amazon fell this year to the
lowest since monitoring started in 1988. Trees soak up carbon
dioxide they grow and release it when they rot or burn.

And Mehrishi said that India was committed to its 2009 pledge
to reduce the amount of carbon emitted per rupee of economic
output by 20 to 25 percent by 2020 from 2005 levels. That
lets emissions rise, but less fast than economic growth.

Doha is trying to extend the existing Kyoto Protocol, which
obliges almost 40 rich nations to cut emissions by an average
of at least 5.2 percent below 1990 levels between 2008 and
2012.

But Russia, Canada and Japan say they are pulling out of
Kyoto, leaving only a core group led by the European Union
and Australia. The United States never joined the 1997 Kyoto
pact.

The head of the UN panel of climate scientists said that
evidence that global warming is man-made was getting
stronger, a blow to sceptics' hopes that rising temperatures
can be explained by natural variations.

"I expect so," Rajendra Pachauri told Reuters when asked if
the panel's next report in 2013 would raise the probability
that human activity was the main cause of climate change from
"at least 90 percent" in its last report in 2007.